Chelsea Handler wants to remind us that she's a force to be reckoned with—regardless of her gender. In an op-ed on the Huffington Post, E! late night host Chelsea Handler spoke out against a New York Times article about Jimmy Fallon's new Tonight show gig that placed her name inside parentheses, while her other late-night competitors, all male, didn't get the same punctuation treatment. "I wanted to confirm what a parenthetical suggests, so I looked up the definition. The first few definitions that came up were: incidental, subordinate in significance, minor or casual," Handler writes.

In the piece, Handler says that she never thought of herself as a woman in a male-dominated genre, only as a viable player in a competitive field: "Until now, I have dismissed the assumption that my experience in late night TV is somehow different or exceptional because of my gender. To me, it's never been about being a woman in a man's world; it's been about delivering a consistently funny and entertaining show each night."

But the Times' choice to include her as an aside, raises the question of sexism for the Handler: "Was it because I'm a woman?" she asks. The Chelsea Lately host notes that her show garners some of the youngest average viewers, the precise audience NBC is targeting with Jimmy Fallon, which makes her much more than a parenthetical factor in the equation. And it's this—the fact that she's actually good at her job—that she wants recognized, not the fact that she's a woman who's good at her job:

"And just as I don't want to be inconsequential in any late-night discourse, I also don't want to be singled-out and lauded merely because I am successful "for a woman." I only want to be acknowledged for having worked hard to build an equally significant audience and fan base to those of my peers. I believe the success of any woman should never be qualified by her gender."

In response to Handler's post, the author of the Times article, Bill Carter, told TheWrap, that it wasn't his intention to mention Handler in an offhand way, because he actually hadn't intended to mention her at all:

"In putting together the layout they came up with that row of faces and we used a photo of Chelsea along with the others and I hope she noticed it was nicely in the center," Carter told the site. "Though I had nothing to do with the placement but that then necessitated including all those folks who were pictured in some way in the text."

So, no worries, he only made Handler a parenthetical part of the conversation because he had to drop her in there somehow. Carter goes on to say that his goal was never to include a comprehensive list of the Tonight show's competitors and anyway, other people were way more angry about being left out altogether:

"I also heard from people for Craig Ferguson and Arsenio who had much better gripes because they got left out altogether and obviously they deserve as much recognition as any of the others. But it was sort of a function of after-the-fact adjustments in the text because of the layout. No slights were intended toward any of these talented people."

But while Carter writes off Handler's argument, TheWrap notes that a report released just this week from the Women's Media Center revealed that women are still underrepresented in media, with the Times as one of the noted offenders with men quoted more often than women in frontpage stories and the number of male columnists outweighing women.

As a woman in media (who, as an aside, happens to be a fan of Chelsea Lately and the host herself), I'm glad she called out the Times article, whether or not sexism was at the root of the punctuation choice. Because I never actually think of myself as "a woman in media." It's easy for me to forget that in 2014 gender is still a factor. I've had the privilege of working with some of the smartest, most inspiring people in journalism—and many of them happen to be women. I, like Handler, never think of myself as a woman in my field, but it serves as a reminder that others might. Thank you Chelsea for the sharp wit, no-bullshit attitude, and articulate opinions you deliver on the regular. No qualifier necessary.